Re: MBR plus emulated FAT

[Eric Blake]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 01:00:05AM +0100, Csepp wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Would it be possible to store the metadata for emulated FAT partitions
> backed by host directories?  It would make installing Windows 98 much
> more seamless, since it would be able to set the boot flag during
> install. I have a 9front install that uses no block devices and gets its
> root file system via a simple 9P server, I've found that extremely
> useful, since it lets me back up or modify files directly from the host.
> 
> I don't have that much free time, but if it wouldn't be too difficult to
> implement this and someone helped, I could try to do it myself.  But
> honestly I would be super thankful if someone else implemented it
> instead.

I wonder if you can already accomplish this using nbdkit-floppy-plugin
(expose a directory as a FAT file system over NBD), then connect qemu
as an NBD client, rather than having to implement this all in qemu
proper.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org